On the Mainland
Here’s another trio of galleries for Detail from my trips to Australia between 2015 and last year, which included various stopovers in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, along with a road-trip in 2015 down the Hume Highway, which I’d done many times before but not for a long while. The galleries cover some of the same ground as Eastern States from a decade earlier, with some additional side trips.
My brother and his family live in Sydney, and our Mum grew up there, so I’ve visited it many times, especially during the eight years in the 1990s when I lived in Canberra. These photos from 2015 and 2017 feature some familiar sights (the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, Taronga Zoo) and some that have been new to me in recent years, like a ferry trip down the Parramatta River from Woolwich, and the redeveloped Barangaroo area near Darling Harbour.
On our last visit to Sydney in 2017 we made a side trip to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains to meet up with my father- and brother-in-law. We went on a bushwalk with them down into the Grand Canyon (no relation) and out along Neates Glen, and visited Katoomba to admire the famous Three Sisters. Some panoramas of this trip and of Sydney feature in Panoramas VIII.
Down the Hume from Sydney and out along the Federal Highway is Canberra, home to my parents-in-law and the place where I spent my twenties. This gallery starts with a few photos of the National Arboretum (established after the early-2000s bushfires) before moving on to Tidbinbilla, a popular day-trip for ACT residents. It then moves down the Hume through a couple of NSW and Victorian towns to Melbourne, featuring photos from there from July 2015 and February 2016, before finishing at the tourist site of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat.
It’s only a snapshot of the Australian mainland as I know it, but a fuller picture will have to wait until I scan my negatives from the 1990s or get back for another visit.